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How to use Claude Code subagents to parallelize development

zachwills.net

121–130 of 131 posts

Re: How to use Claude Code subagents to parallelize development

#121

I am sceptical if these persona based agents really make that much of a difference, and more "appear" to make a difference because of their talk style. Underneath is just a system prompt, or more likely a prompt layered on top "You are a frontend engineer, competent in react and Next.js, tailwind-css" - the stack details and project layout, key information is already in the CLAUDE.md. For more stuff the model is goin…

I found a study a while ago that measured the effect of defining personas, and the effect was significant, but not very big. I like defining roles because I think it makes setting boundaries a bit easier. When I assign the role of architect for brainstorming, I expect the model to be a bit less eager to immediately jump into implementation. I'll still tell it explicitly to not do that, so the effect is probably extremely small.

So far, I find it much more important to define task scope and boundaries. If I want to implement a non-trivial feature, I'll have one role for analyzing the problem and coming up with a high-level plan, and then another role for breaking that plan down into very small atomic steps. I'll then pass each step to an implementation role and give it both the high-level plan and the whole list of individual steps as context, while making it clear that the scope is only to implement that one specific step.

I've had very good results with this so far, and once the two main documents are done, I can automate this with a small orchestration script (that does not depend on an LLM and is completely deterministic) going through the list and passing each item to an implementation agent sequentially, even letting the agent create a commit message after every step so I can trace its work afterwards. I've had very clean long-running tasks this way with minimal need for fixing things afterwards. I can go to bed in the evening and launch it and wake up to a long list of commits.

With the new 6 dollar subscription by Z.ai which includes 120 prompts (around 2000 requests) every 5 hours, I can pretty much let this run without having to worry about exceeding my limits.

Re: How to use Claude Code subagents to parallelize development

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You didn't not bother reading my actual criticism against subagent model: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/s/weQIbVtAtG Let me say it again, subagent model does not work for things which most developer do 90% of their time they want to implement a feature in their app.

> You didn't not bother reading my actual criticism against subagent model: Nope, I did. It's why I was under the impression that you hadn't yet figured out how to use them successfully. That's why I posted a specific example where a subagent is useful and why, hoping you and others might benefit from that. If the subagent model does not work 90% of the time, why does the workflow model you recommend in another Reddi…

I've been using sub agents for long time now, see: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1nh75k2/3_phase...

Re: How to use Claude Code subagents to parallelize development

#123

All of this stuff seems completely insane to me and something my coding agent should handle for me. And it probably will in a year.

I feel the same. We’re still in the very early days of AI agents. Honestly, just orchestrating CC subagents alone could already be a killer product.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately!

Re: How to use Claude Code subagents to parallelize development

#124
post #3

Follow up from my last post; lots were asking for more examples. I will be around if anybody has questions this morning.

Can it work without Linear, using md files?

Hey -- sorry was out of town so didn't see this! It could definitely work without Linear. You'd need to modify the command for the linear stuff to just write to MD files and make sure you pass those through to the other agents.

Re: How to use Claude Code subagents to parallelize development

#126
post #38

How do you not get lost mentally in what is exactly happening at each point in time? Just trusting the system and reviewing the final output? I feel like my cognitive constraints become the limits of this parallelized system. With a single workstream I pollute context, but feel way more secure somehow.

I think that is the whole point. The new limiting factor is going to be our own ability to multitask effectively. It will be a new skill to hone.

Re: How to use Claude Code subagents to parallelize development

#127

I'm commenting while agents run in project trying to achieve something similar to this. I feel like "we all" are trying to do something similar, in different ways, and in a fast moving space (i use claude code and didn't even know subagents were a thing). My gut feeling from past experiences is that we have git, but now git-flow, yet: a standardized approach that is simple to learn and implement across teams. Once (i…

Yea, whoever / whatever cracks the nut on the standardized way to work in this new env is going to win big.

Re: How to use Claude Code subagents to parallelize development

#128

That sounds crazy to me, Claude Code has so many limitations. Last week I asked Claude Code to set up a Next.js project with internationalization. It tried to install a third party library instead of using the internationalization method recommended for the latest version of Next.js (using Next's middleware) and could not produce of functional version of the boilerplate site. There are some specific cases where agent…

This is where prompting comes in. You need to remember to tell it about which libs you want or encourage it to web search to find the latest ones, or use something like context7 MCP to get the latest versions.

Re: How to use Claude Code subagents to parallelize development

#129
post #114

This type of posts has nothing to do with real world applications. With all due respect to the .agents/ markdown files, Claude code often, like other LLMs, get fixed on a certain narrative, and no matter what the instructions are, it repeats that wrong choice over and over and over again, while “apologizing”… Anything beyond a close and intimate review of its implementation is doomed to fail. What made things a bit b…

We are using this sort of workflow in real world applications at work in brownfield codebases. It is working well!

Re: How to use Claude Code subagents to parallelize development

#130

I often see people making these sub agents modelled on roles like product manager, back end developer, etc. I spent a few hours trying stuff like this and the results were pretty bad compared to just using CC with no agent specific instructions. Maybe I needed to push through and find a combination that works but I don't find this article convincing as the author basically says "it works" without showing examples or…

I think it's both and. Role based works well in some cases. Task based well in others. It's a false choice to think you have to pick one or the other all the time.
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